JManga To Include “A Few Thousand” Titles By First Year

“We plan on starting with a few hundred titles at launch and increasing to a few thousand by the first year and working towards 10,000 by the third year,” JManga’s Robert Newman revealed in a recent interview with About.com.

JManga.com is an online portal for manga created by the Digital Comics Association, a group of 39 Japanese manga publishers.

Its goal is to provide more manga than is currently available to the English-speaking market, and to do it faster. We’ve covered JManga in the past but you can learn a whole lot more about it at the link above.

Sasha-kun is just so cool. Tremble prostrate before me in fear! Ahaha! Just love it. The action and intensity is so epic. How can anyone not stand it?

http://twitter.com/Zhemos Jason A

Well, I thought Jmanga was gonna use the crunchyroll model, but apparently you have to subscribe to everything you want to read. And the pricing is up to the publisher, no CR type flat fee to read everything you want. My hype has officially been crushed.

I don’t see this being popular anytime soon, as It’s gonna be quite expensive.

MrSirFeatherFang

That sucks… (also the “you” is referring to JManga)

http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/members/55321.html FinalArcadia

Menacing…yet adorable.

Covnam

Did they mention that in the article linked above?
That’s unfortunate if that ends up being the final model. It’s not like people will be reading hundreds of titles at a time, but unless it’s priced aggressively it could end up being very expensive to follow more than just a few titles.

lurkingsalt

All that was said is that each publisher is in charge of pricing. Each one can decide to sell by chapter or by volume. From my understanding after reading through the whole thing is that is that they are going to take feedback very seriously. Even if they decide this type of model at launch, I think it can change with enough customer demand. I expect that pricing is one thing that’s going to go through a lot of changes in the long run.

M’iau M’iaut

But that long run will be a very short one if folks pop in and see a multitude of different price scales. Folks will get confused and just walk away. The crunchyroll model of unlimited access after the monthly fee is really the only way things are going to work.

At a few hundred titles, let alone 10k, you’ve got to allow folks to try things they don’t know and then read them going forward. Otherwise you will only get folks coming to read Bleach, TWGOK or whatever title shows up as wishes on this thread.

And there are already plenty of ways one can do that, without having to pay a monthly fee.

lurkingsalt

But there’s 39 Publishers here. I don’t know how splitting the costs among each other at a low monthly price is going to work either. The bigger/more popular companies are going to want a bigger cut then the smaller ones etc. I just see a much harder time of them accepting a deal all amongst each other for an unlimited plan. Hopefully I’m wrong and they figure it out really quickly.

M’iau M’iaut

But CR already shows there’s a way to do this with anime of wildly differing popularity and production houses of different sizes. Far more watch Bleach and Naruto than White Album, but one does not pay some special Naruto tax. Nor are they dissuaded from trying one of the many lesser-known romance titles, just because the first ‘subscription’ they paid for was Fortune Arterial.

Covnam

You do have a point that nearly 40 publishers is a lot to split a single monthly fee amongst. It would probably require a more subscribers than is likely to happen, at least in the short term. While I’d prefer an unlimited/all access option, I could see an a-la-carte model working. A monthly fee gets you access to a set number of any titles.
The key thing is though that all the publishers need to work on a consistent pricing. One website featuring 39 different publishers shouldn’t have 39 different pricing schemes. It will just confuse readers and drive people away.

https://twitter.com/#!/SplashdownTiger STiger

Translate all of the Kino no Tabi light novels and I’ll consider it.

lurkingsalt

I loved the anime. I never knew it was a novel. How many books are we talking about here?

https://twitter.com/#!/SplashdownTiger STiger

Wikipedia says 14. I honestly want them in book form. I have the one translated by TokyoPop, but I’ve heard and also read about how they botched that pretty badly.

Soma

Yes, this. And Gakuen Kino.

doubletaco

mite b cool

But punctuality is key here. I can get my The World God Only Knows chapters a couple of days after the week’s Shonen Sunday hits, and at very good quality at that. I’m all for supporting the industry, but they have to show that they can provide a solid product in a timely manner in order to get my money.

Kai2591

True that.

And TWGOK FTW.

haqua

Hell yeah! (Yuiiiii~)

M’iau M’iaut

In an earlier thread about this, I’d floated the idea harnessing the Red Hawks and other top teams of the internet world made the sense in moving this program forward. The best scan teams have garnered their own followings, especially regarding unpublished in the US manga. As you note, these teams, working on volunteer time, produce within a week darn near publication quality work.

http://tristsantithesis.tumblr.com/ Tsunayoshi Sawada

I think its too much to be expected that the chapters make it in time for the weekly release. Maybe volumes will be simultaneous with online english versions released online when the street dates for the published JPN version is released. Would you be willing to pay by the chapter for TWGOK…

http://www.facebook.com/santd Daniel Sant

sounds cool, but isn’t the name JManga a little redundant? >>;

dusk

Using the same reasoning, you would think J-Comi is an oxymoron, right? But all the cool names have been taken by fan-scanlation groups. =(

Kai2591

10,000??
That’s OVER NINE-THOUSAAAANDDD!!11

If they can pull it off….it’ll be a manga revolution, perhaps?
I don’t mind investing some money for that.

Soma

A few hundred titles at launch is good. If there are enough interesting titles to start with, I don’t think that it would be hard for JManga to muster the support to bring them to a few thousand within a year of launch.

I am in full support of this. Honestly, it should have started sooner.

amagidyne

Hopefully we can get some yuri now! I’d love to see Fu~Fu, Aoi Hana or Girl Friends brought over.

Mister_Nep

And here I thought I knew just about every single yuri title out there.

What’s Fu~Fu?

amagidyne

A very sweet slice-of-life-ish series. According to MyAnimeList it’s also referred to as ‘Wife and Wife’, so you may have heard of it by that name instead.

Although, I don’t know if Ichijinsha is a part of the Digital Comics Association. Does anyone have a list of the publishers involved?

Mister_Nep

Oh Wife and Wife! I love that manga! It’s so adorable. Such a good title.

Juuu

I’d LOVE some Girl Friends in English. such a great series, even as someone who has never read any yuri before~

shuratan

I truly think this is great for the english manga fans out there, though as it is I’m one of those old fashioned people who likes a book in their hands for reading. Hopefully this can turn the tide where people just get all their stuff free online and think that it’s perfectly okay.

Roses4Aria

Well, with that many possible titles surely there will be a few good shoujo or josei series in there. A girl can dream…

thaKingRocka

I like it.

Göran Isacson

I’m all for this service- I don’t think it will ever be as fast as scanlation sites because most scanlations sites actually give us the scans SOONER than they’re printed, but if the translations are high quality? Oh yes, I’m all for this.

If they ever extend the service to Europe, that is.

http://www.ukanime.com abigsmurf

Given how incredibly unreliable scanlations are for less popular series I approve of this.

Hoping they go after a decent range of Seinen titles rather than just mainstream shonen and shoujo.

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